The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Monday, November 25, 2013

That guidance (to paraphrase Hearst’s famous admonition to
Frederic Remington on the occasion of the Spanish-American War, “You furnish
the pictures, I’ll furnish the war,”) pretty much sums up the interaction of
the government of Japan and the Western media on the matter of the Chinese Air
Defense Identification Zone or ADIZ.

I’m not going to engage in Fisking by bulk here, but Western
outlets have unanimously spun the Chinese ADIZ as some reckless stunt to
challenge Japan over the Senkaku airspace.

Bullshit.

Basically, as I describe in an article for Asia Times
Online, China's Defense Zone Creates a Flap, the Chinese ADIZ does tweak Japan on the matter of the Senkakus by
extending the southeast corner of the envelope to cover the islands.

However, the ADIZ covers all of the East China Sea between
Japan and the PRC.It is not an
assertion of sovereignty.It creates a
zone in which unidentified aircraft are required to identify themselves to
Chinese authorities.It’s an early
warning system meant to provide time cushion in an era of high speed warplanes.

America has an ADIZ.

For aviation enthusiasts, here is a very interesting and
somewhat technical description provided by the FAA on enforcement of the USADIZ.

Spoiler: in principle, if not depth of detail, the
implementation looks pretty much like the Chinese ADIZ—except it’s stricter, requires
prefiling a flight plan, and specifies a rather onerous-looking tolerance of
plus/minus 5 minutes and 20 nautical miles for deviations from the plan.

Guess what.Japan
also has an ADIZ.

The Chinese ADIZ directly parallels and overlaps the
Japanese ADIZ—a fact that has escaped most of the press in its vaporings over
the issue. (From Taylor Fravel's tweet: yellow line = Chinese ADIZ; red line = Japanese ADIZ; red field = overlap.)

So, if properly implemented and respected by both sides, the Chinese ADIZ is
stabilizing, not destabilizing.

Abe told a parliamentary session that China's declaration of the zone above
the islands (known as the Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China) altered the
state of affairs in the East China Sea and escalated a tense situation.

"The measures by the Chinese side have no validity whatsoever on Japan,
and we demand China revoke any measures that could infringe upon the freedom of
flight in international airspace," Abe said during an upper house session.
"It can invite an unexpected occurrence and it is a very dangerous thing
as well."

I’m assuming Abe’s refusal to accept the Chinese ADIZ draws
strength from US concerns about the PRC move voiced by Secretary of Defense
Chuck Hagel and Secretary of State John Kerry.In contrast to previous PRC-Japan jostling, the United States has
clearly lined up with Japan and also went the extra mile to reaffirm that the mutual
defense treaty covers the Senkakus.

The DoD statement reads:

"The United States is deeply concerned by the People's Republic of China
announcement today that it is establishing an air defense identification zone
in the East China Sea. We view this development as a destabilizing
attempt to alter the status quo in the region. This unilateral action increases
the risk of misunderstanding and miscalculations.

"This announcement by the People's Republic of China will not in any way
change how the United States conducts military operations in the region.

"The United States is conveying these concerns to China through diplomatic
and military channels, and we are in close consultation with our allies and
partners in the region, including Japan.

"We remain steadfast in our commitments to our allies and
partners. The United States reaffirms its longstanding policy that
Article V of the U.S.-Japan Mutual Defense Treaty applies to the Senkaku
Islands."

In my personal opinion, the US statement is not relating to
China’s declaration of an ADIZ (after all, both the United States and Japan
have them) but in the fact that the PRC declared the ADIZ unilaterally and, in
its ambiguous wording of the regulations, conveyed the implication that US
warplanes in the zone might be expected to obey the instructions of whoever was
enforcing the Chinese ADIZ.

If the US military has one absolute imperative in East Asia,
it is its ability to sail where it wants and fly where it wants subject to some
extremely limited and carefully parsed limits imposed by international law (for
instance, by a judicious exploitation of loopholes in the Law of the Sea Treaty—which
the US hasn’t even ratified—the US Navy has openly repudiated Chinese
objections and affirmed the right to conduct military surveillance detrimental
to the PRC’s national security within the PRC’s Exclusive Economic Zone).

As for aircraft, the most famous incident relating to the
PRC, of course, was the collision of a Chinese fighter jet with a US EP-3 surveillance
plane over China’s EEZ off Hainan Island in April 2001.Despite vociferous complaints by the PRC, the U.S. took an effective and
convincing stand that it had the right to continue the surveillance flights.

Based on a quick survey of the literature, US armed forces
assert the right to fly through any international airspace without
restriction.However, as a concession to
the anxieties of other governments about unidentified aircraft near their
borders, at least in the case of Peru, I did find that the US encouraged Peru
to check the flight plans on file and approach the planes, rather gingerly I
expect, to confirm their markings.In
other words, no radio chatter, no transponder stuff.

If the United States is going to initiate AirSea Battle, in
other words, it isn’t going to tip its hand when it enters the Chinese ADIZ, or
help out Chinese air defense by turning on its transponders.

The PRC is not going to be able to challenge that freedom
just by publishing some regulations.

Despite the US decision to tilt toward Japan on the ADIZ
issue, I expect that this story will join the platter of mislabeled China-threat
nothingburgers heaped up by the media, including but not limited to the “PRC
Coast Guard regs allow China to stop ships transiting the South China Sea”
canard and the “China claims Okinawa” BS.

Saturday, November 23, 2013

I’ve come up with a new coinage FUSMAL, “Fucked Up on So Many
Levels” to describe the NSA follies.

I took note of the recent Washington Post poll which found
that 60% of respondents believe that Edward Snowden’s revelations had “harmed
U.S. security.”

This represented an 11% jump over July, when 49% thought his
revelations had harmed U.S. security.

I suppose this increase, which came about equally from the
minority who thought he didn’t harm U.S. security (37% in July; 32% now) and
the undecided (down to 8% now, from 13%), can be attributed to the shift of the
focus of releases from domestic privacy violations to espionage on foreign
governments.

37% think he did “the right thing” and 55% think he did “the
wrong thing”.

It is of course interesting that, as of now, Edward Snowden
is doing “the nothing”.He gave up his
documents before he entered Russia and all the revelations, shocking and
otherwise, are the responsibility of Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian, and, yes
the Washington Post, which is perhaps anxiously waiting for some other pollster
to ask the question, “Do you think the Washington Post is doing the ‘right
thing’?”

I don’t believe that Edward Snowden “harmed U.S. security”
in a practical sense.

Snowden and his media collaborators have been sedulous in suppressing
information that would be directly helpful to America’s
enemies/competitors/China.The
revelations have, of course, created a political uproar in places like Brazil
and Germany, which have some pretenses to independent foreign policies and now
have to deal with domestic calls to decouple their internet communications from
the U.S.

However, I have a feeling that Germany, which served as home
base for a clutch of the 9/11 perpetrators and is anxious host of a lot of
Muslim immigrants and guest workers, is going to find a way to maintain its surveillance
and intelligence sharing regime with the United States even if it takes
measures to get the NSA out of Andrea Merkel’s cell phone.

So I think that Mr. Snowden, as he tucks into his bowl of
borscht with sour cream and watches his first Russian winter descend like a
great icy hammer outside his window, can console himself with the confidence
that he has not materially degraded the security of the citizens of the United
States.

IMHO the NSA, on the other hand, has done a pretty good job
of screwing up the Western world’s intelligence regime.

The root of the NSA’s problem is that it is committed to
hegemony in the global information space.Hegemony is an understandable ambition since U.S. technology, equipment,
and infrastructure still dominate the global transmission of information.

I refer doubters about this objective to the homepage of
IARPA.

Readers may be familiar with DARPA—the Defense Advanced
Research Project Agency.It’s a
government incubator that reaches out to the academic and private sector to
develop technologies that the DoD find useful, like robotic trucks that can drive
unmanned through war zones—and an idea to link computers on opposite sides of
the country in order to efficiently utilize computing resources.You may know this successful initiative as “the
Internet”.

IARPA—the “Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity”,
pronounced “yarpa”—is DARPA for spooks.It’s a research agency under the Director of National Intelligence and
it pours a lot of money into things like quantum computing (the holy grail for
cracking strong encryption) because…

…well, here’s the first sentence from the statement “About [IARPA]” on the IARPA website:

The Intelligence
Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) invests in high-risk, high-payoff
research programs that have the potential to provide the United States with an
overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries.

The NSA’s data greed, the desire to “have it all”, is not
just a matter of organizational hubris and mission creep.It’s built into US security policy strategy.Leveraging US capabilities to dominate the
information space is seen as the key U.S. advantage in 21st century
strategic competition.

Domestically, the US government has bent and probably broken
US laws and the will of the FISA court and colluded with service providers in
order to collect US communications data.And it has subverted the fundamental security and safety of the Internet
in order to facilitate NSA access.

Bad news is, the quest for “an overwhelming intelligence
advantage” can’t stop at America’s borders.Since even our closest allies shrink from openly surrendering their data
sovereignty to US surveillance, the NSA has been forced to improvise a covert
network of alliances and intrusions in order to get “it all”.

The most recent report on the NSA,
by the NRC Handelsblad (a newspaper in the Netherlands) provided an interesting
graphic showing the overseas data network penetration by the NSA.It reported that the NSA had successfully
infected 50,000 computers in non-ally jurisdictions with Computer Network
Exploitation a.k.a. malware.

I would also draw the inference that countries without
yellow dots are jurisdictions that are probably knowingly cooperating with the
NSA and therefore don’t need to be penetrated with malware.

There don’t seem to be any yellow dots in
the Five Eyes countries, for instance.But there are also don’t seem to be any yellow dots in France, Germany,
Spain, Italy, the Scandanavian countries, Central America, Japan, Indonesia, Argentina,
or Chile.

But even our closest and most enthusiastic ally, Great
Britain, was probably subjected to covert espionage in violation of the “Five
Eyes” agreement that the telecommunications of the U.S., U.K., New Zealand,
Australia, and Canada would be mutually respected.

No doubt the metastasizing network of yellow, red, and blue
dots across the globe was regarded with joy by the NSA bigwigs.But one could also look at the network and
see each dot as an added security risk for an over-extended, undermanaged, and
insecure intelligence initiative (note that this graphic was distributed to all of the "Five Eyes").

There were tens of thousands of potential Edward Snowdens
with the necessary clearances inside the NSA and its subcontractor
agencies.There are probably thousands,
if not tens of thousands more, in intelligence agencies and IT corporations and
installations within the Five Eyes and our allies around the world.

A major breach is something not just the NSA is worrying
about.That’s undoubtedly what GCHQ and
every other allied security service is worrying about.And the risk becomes bigger as more and more
dots pop up on the board and more foreign data is shoveled into the maw of the
NSA.

And I expect foreign governments are asking themselves whether the omnivorous
U.S. demand for sigint is a matter of achieving joint security, or U.S.
unilateral information hegemony.

So we have a covert, improvised unilateral intelligence
gathering regime executed by to a significant extent by partners whose loyalty
is less than absolute and whose actions we are unable to control.

On one level, the Snowden revelations were a remarkable
one-off.

At a certain level US priorities will diverge from those of
our willing and unwilling intelligence partners.

On another level, the emergence of Snowden may have simply
been the inevitable product of a destabilizing, overextended covert operation
that was teetering on the edge of collapse.

Britain and the US are the main two partners in the 'Five-Eyes'
intelligence-sharing alliance, which also includes Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Until now, it had been generally understood that the citizens of each country
were protected from surveillance by any of the others.

But the Snowden material reveals that:

• In 2007, the rules were changed to allow the NSA to analyse and retain any British
citizens' mobile phone and fax numbers, emails and IP addresses swept up by its
dragnet. Previously, this data had been stripped out of NSA databases –
"minimized", in intelligence agency parlance – under rules agreed
between the two countries.

• These communications were "incidentally collected" by the NSA, meaning the
individuals were not the initial targets of surveillance operations and
therefore were not suspected of wrongdoing.

• The NSA has
been using the UK data to conduct so-called "pattern of life" or
"contact-chaining" analyses, under which the agency can look up to
three "hops" away from a target of interest – examining the
communications of a friend of a friend of a friend. Guardian analysis suggests
three hops for a typical Facebook user could pull the data of more than 5
million people into the dragnet.

• A separate draft memo, marked top-secret and dated from 2005, reveals a
proposed NSA
procedure for spying on the citizens of the UK and other Five-Eyes nations,
even where the partner government has explicitly denied the US permission to do
so. The memo makes clear that partner countries must not be informed about this
surveillance, or even the procedure itself.

When intelligence community apologists get wrongfooted by
these kinds of revelations, one is inclined to wonder: is the so-called security
insider who is allaying (and in some cases ridiculing) the public’s anxieties over government
surveillance practices a clueless dupe or a duplicitous shill?

Inquiring minds want to know.

The most recent revelation is tantalizing as it relates to
my own personal hobbyhorse, as discussed in a previous post with the theme Blame Canada: did the NSA diddle with
traffic patterns through its corporate buddies on the North American backbone
and route US persons’ data to Five Eyes partners—like maybe Canada--for
storage, collection, and processing, and thereby receive its tittle-tattle on
interesting Americans second hand via a foreign intelligence agency, thereby
not violating the letter of the U.S. law prohibiting these kinds of
interception without a warrant?

With this background, the most interesting element for me
was one that the Guardian didn’t even bother to report on.It only appears in the Guardian’s reproduction
of the 2007 memo (click on the image at the head of the article for the full
text) authorizing collection of UK persons’ info.The memo baldly stated that “unmasked” UK
data—if I understand it correctly, this simply means in this case “metadata
that has been revealed as relating to a UK person” is not only fair game for review by NSA analysts; it may also be dumped into a
database for access by GCHQ:

“[US Analysts] Are not required to forward unmasked UK
contact identifiers to GCHQ unless specifically requested by GCHQ.GCHQ should receive all unmasked UK contact
identifiers via established or mutually agreed forwarding means or the contact
identifiers should be available in the GCHQ-accessible five-eyes [deleted]
database, the [deleted] access to [deleted], or other GCHQ-accessible metadata
stores.”

Hmmm.Certainly
sounds like the NSA was not only collecting UK data; it was making it available
to GCHQ.If that was the case, one would
assume it worked the other way around as well.

There’s probably more onion to be peeled.Maybe a couple more layers down we’ll find
out if we can really {drumroll} “blame
Canada.”

If this scenario is determined, I reserve the right to name the illicit, escalating signint exchange with our neighbor in the Great White North "snowballing". In honor of Kevin Smith, of course.